Today’s News & Buzz

The Hollywood Bowl has always been a venue for trying out new talent. With high-definition video now part of the equation, the temptation for the Los Angeles Philharmonic to entice the most attractive young performers must be greater than ever..... More »

Carlisle Floyd, who turned 88 this year, is best known as the composer of two of the most frequently produced American operas, Susannah and Of Mice and Men. In fact, he has written nine others and is said to be fulfilling a new commission for Houston, perhaps to shame youthful quitters like Verdi an.... More »

Regietheater is supposed to be an exercise in extracting the underlying truth in a libretto and bringing it to the fore by a radical revaluation or re-appropriation of its symbolic framework. In the big picture, Frank Castorf’s staging of Wagner’s Das Rheingold for the Bayreuth Festival .... More »

* Notes * Merola Opera Program’s latest production of Don Giovanni (pictured left, photograph by Kristen Loken) opened with the first of two performances on Thursday night. Director James Darrah’s production goes against the text and the drama, with most of the action taking place in an artist’s studio, designed by Emily MacDonald and Cameron Mock…

Tons of people have devoted their whole life to new music, but few people have done so to the same extent as composer/trombonist Jim Staley, who for more than a quarter of a century devoted his home to it as well. But 35 years on, Roulette has moved boroughs and has gone from being new music in someone’s home to a home for new music.

A week from tomorrow, August 9 at 10 AM, I’ll be delivering a lecture on American opera at the Glimmerglass Festival. It’s a favorite subject of mine, and one I rarely get to talk or write much about. Other professors than myself teach copiously about opera at Bard, and one dream course I’ve never ventured […]

A Strauss choral work and an Elgar symphony – Vassily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra shook things up with devastating impact at Prom 19. Strauss’s Festival Prelude was written for a grand occasion – the opening of a new concert hall in Vienna in 1913. It’s a massive, no-holds-barred piece glorying in drama and excess, ideal for grand surroundings like the Royal Albert Hall Strauss packs intense power concentrated in a relatively short piece…

There's a complicated drama playing out offstage at New York's Metropolitan Opera. At its most basic, it's the story of management and labor unions fighting over a supposedly dwindling pot of money. The deadline to solve the squabble before a lockout, midnight Thursday, was met with little resolution but a 72-hour extension…

The $22 million estate of Richard Adler, composer of The Pyjama Game and other Broadway hits, has become a battleground between the great man’s son and grandchildren and his ‘high-living’ fifth wife.
Counsel for the kids says the wife, Susan Ivory, 70, went on a spending spree in the years before Adler’s death in 2012, aged 90…

In the 1960s, perhaps a bit earlier, a lively conversation started about “opening up” musical form, or even more directly, about a formal genre marked by such an opening, an “open form.” This might mean that the composer opens up the continuity of a work to the non-obvious sequences, or that additional choices are given to the performer with regard to the same, or perhaps listeners might engage the form of the work in ways other than the simply chronological…

No agenda here other than to share my enthusiasm for a recent purchase. ‘M. A. Charpentier at the Chapelle Royale de Versailles’ is the new 2 CD + DVD set from Jordi Savall, Montserrat Figueras, La Capella Reial de Catalunya and Le Concert des Nations, and it couples the composer’s Canticum ad Beatam Virginem Mariam with his Missa Assumpta est Maria and two instrumental works for viols…